


America's Monster

by Prim_the_Amazing



Series: stars stripes and teeth [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M, Venom AU, bucky is a symbiote and steve is his host, not particularly gory but i mean bucky does eat a dude
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-27
Updated: 2019-03-27
Packaged: 2019-12-25 12:24:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,152
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18261233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Prim_the_Amazing/pseuds/Prim_the_Amazing
Summary: Winter takes stock.Things are bad. Winter has never been inside this newest host’s species type before, but he can immediately tell that this one is broken anyways. Built inefficiently, poorly, badly,wrong.The host’s spine is misaligned, its immune system crippled, its eyesight lacking, hearing lackluster, itsfeetare somehow not the way they should be, the joints ache, the lungs arefloundering.Winter’s host can’t even breathe right.This is it. This is the trap. Winter’s captors think that they can kill it by trapping it in a weak, dying host.They think wrong.





	America's Monster

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kalika_999](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalika_999/gifts).



“It came down to earth in a meteor,” Doctor Erskine tells him. “Practically on the doorstep of my forest cottage.”

Steve watches the thing roil inside of the glass container. He’s never seen anything like it. It’s not a machine, not an animal, not a plant. Something entirely new, different. Something from out there, amongst the stars.

“Well, slight exaggeration,” Erskine admits with a sheepish grin and a shrug. “But I was stargazing, and it was far enough out in the wilderness that I was the first one to get to it. Finders keepers.”

“What is it?” he asks, wide eyed. This is even crazier than Howard Stark’s (briefly) flying car at the science fair.

“This,” Erskine says proudly, “is an _alien.”_

It’s a black that Steve could never capture with paint; this must be what it feels like to stare out into total impenetrable darkness. Into the void, the abyss at the very deepest part of the ocean, a black hole. It moves, all on its own, and he can’t see how it manages. It waves and ripples and clings, like water without gravity.

“It cannot breathe our air,” Erskine goes on. “Not outside of this small cage I’ve made for it, not alone. When I found it, it was… attaching itself to a nearby deer. Breathing with its lungs.”

Steve’s eyes finally snaps away from the alien back over to Erskine, alarmed. “What?” he says, trying to imagine it. Every image he comes up with is _gruesome._

Erskine lifts one halting hand. “Not actually as gory as you would imagine. The alien sunk into the deer’s like a cloth absorbing water. Clearly, it’s what this creature was born for. It survives by latching onto others. The deer, unfortunately, didn’t last long… Something about the procedure disagreed with it. For a long time, I thought that that was the norm, as I ferried it from lab rat to expiring rab lat. But I’ve researched this specimen thoroughly, and I believe that if it can just find the right host, a _worthy_ host, then the host and the creature can not only live in harmony but become stronger and better than ever before.”

Steve looks at the alien, reaching out to touch the glass its encased in.

 _Don’t tap on fishbowls, Stevie,_ his ma had once told him. _It scares them._

He stops shy of actually touching it.

Erskine looks at him, serious and solemn. “No one can demand this of you--”

“I’ll do it,” Steve says. He has to help somehow, and if probably dying in a science experiment is the only opportunity he has, then that’s exactly what he’s gonna do.

 

Winter hasn’t had a host in seven days now, trapped in this smooth, transparent cage. Winter is starving. But that’s fine. Winter is named Winter because it can survive even the most brutal of conditions. It's a survivor. It can scrape through lean starvation until it finds an opportunity for escape, for food. Winter is as patient as a glacier, old and icy and ready.

On day eight, it happens. Its captors don’t even get sloppy; they _let it go._ Through a funnel (which is deliberate, which is a trap, but there is nowhere else to go but to stay where it is and starve to death, so it goes and determines to survive no matter what it finds at the end of the narrow tube) and straight to a new host. It sinks into it immediately, desperately, through its mouth and its eyes and ears and nose and pores and skin, taking root.

Winter takes stock.

Things are bad. Winter has never been inside this newest host’s species type before, but he can immediately tell that this one is broken anyways. Built inefficiently, poorly, badly, _wrong._ The host’s spine is misaligned, its immune system crippled, its eyesight lacking, hearing lackluster, its _feet_ are somehow not the way they should be, the joints ache, the lungs are _floundering._ Winter’s host can’t even breathe right.

This is it. This is the trap. Winter’s captors think that they can kill it by trapping it in a weak, dying host.

They think wrong.

It takes over the immune system first, because it is clearly stupid and not doing the job right, attacking the wrong things. It’s finishing up setting that on its correct course when the other host-species--humans, their shared knowledge pool supplies--start unstrapping its host, muttering warily to each other and interrogating its host before it--he, Steven Grant Rogers, Stevie, Steve, smallfry, bastard, asshole, nice young man--is even back on his feet. Winter focuses on tuning Steve’s ears, trusting that the other humans won’t kill its host immediately, not knowing the mistake they’re making.

“Do you feel any differences--”

“He doesn’t look any different, was this a bust or--”

“Tell me who the current president is--”

“What if it’s _possessing_ him--”

“Um,” Steve says, a strong sense of wide eyed _disorientation_ coming from him, along with sudden, overwhelmingly distracting nausea, a side effect from Winter messing with his inner ear. He stumbles, and someone catches him. Winter gets started on the eyes. “I think my hearing is better? I can hear you,” he says to the man hushedly insisting on putting him in quarantine.

The man does not look reassured by this, paling and backing away as if from something contagious. Feh. He’d be lucky to have Winter even _consider_ him as a host, which it won’t. This one’s good enough. It just has to fix up all of the serious physical diseases and maladies so this thing can be at all useful to it, pilot him somewhere far away from cages and captors, and then find the next host as this one starts to deteriorate. 

Eyes fixed. It just had to do a few tweaks, realigning small things. Steve blinks rapidly, eyes watering and blurring. There are many more changes to make, but they’re all the sort of thing it’ll need a significant amount of fuel to fix.

Fortunately, Winter and its host are surrounded by fuel, clamoring close and curious. It goes sharp and aware as it starts assessing its options. Once it picks one, the rest are sure to scatter like frightened prey, and it doesn’t want to waste the energy on a chase so it needs to pick a good and meaty one on the first try--

Steve recoils away from the people surrounding him. “Woah!” he yelps. “Get away, it feels hungry!”

… Hosts usually aren’t that quick to adapt to it. The ability to feel it as it does them is always there, yes, but it always takes them such a long time to notice. Usually longer than they have to live.

Everyone is quick to nervously follow instructions, flinching and scurrying away. An annoying complication--

One of the humans pulls out a weapon and kills Winter’s first human captor. Erskine, the knowledge pool tells him. It feels nothing at this, but Steve feels shock-horror-grief. The attacking human then turns its weapon towards Steve-and-Winter.

The meal has finally presented itself.

The weapon fires, and Winter jerks their body out of the line of fire before they can be hit, quicker than Steve’s reaction times could be, pitifully slow (not when it’s done with him, though).

Surprisingly, Steve starts sprinting towards the attacker without its nudging or outright control. Between fight or flight, he is naturally predisposed towards fight. Good. He’s a predator for now, until his body starts trying and failing to reject Winter and kills itself. He needs to act like it. Steve’s feet are flat and ungainly, and Winter helps him keep his balance as well as it can, but mainly keeping its focus on twitching and plucking muscles so that Steve twists out of the way of the hostile fire--bullets--in time to not be hit. The approach is slow, but the attacking human is stupid enough to just stand there and carefully take aim and shoot, slow on the uptake. It will not be able to hit them.

Small, weak Steve has clearly not bothered to stop and think about what he will do once he finally reaches the attacker, dying Erskine and the very present and rapid gunfire and screaming from fleeing onlookers driving all thought out of his head. He acts as if he’s going to clobber the attacker down with his twig arms and fragile knuckles.

It doesn’t matter. As soon as Steve is within arms reach, Winter envelops him, bursting forth from skin, tall and broad and dark with traces of silver running through him. They tower over the attacker, who freezes like prey under their looming shadow, weapon dropping, jaw falling, eyes going wide.

Winter opens its mouth, unhinges its jaw _(anaconda),_ and starts choking the man down starting from the head, picking him up and pushing him down its throat. Its form is malleable, and so it makes razor sharp teeth ring its throat, makes them whirl like a death machine to mix him into a fine easily digestible slurry. It crams the last of him down past its lips, and then after a moment expels the bloody shredded clothes from its mouth to land wetly on the floor _(hairball)._

All of the humans are staring at Winter, still and dead silent.

Winter ignores them, focusing on spending the acquired nutrients in an efficient way.

 

Steve must be dreaming. He feels weightless, bodiless, like he’s floating in a dark void. It should be frightening, upsetting, but he feels warm and protected here, like he’s sunk his head underneath a rare warm bath and all of his aching joints are sighing in unison in relief at the gentle heat, like he’s drowsing comfortably underneath his blankets, too out of his head to feel the pains of his body yet.

And then it feels like his blankets are yanked off and the cold air is waking him properly up, like the plugs been pulled and the nice warm water is draining away to leave him wet and bare in the chill. But there’s no aching joints, no pains of his body. It’s just abrupt light, abrupt awareness, and he dizzily blinks his eyes at dozens of guns leveled at him from several wary, nervous feet away.

He stares, and then slowly raises his hands.

“Private Rogers?” Carter calls out from behind the men with guns, looking a little peeved at not being in front of them instead but determined to be mature about it. “Is that you?”

“Yes?”

“Less uncertainty would be reassuring.”

“Who else would I be?”

“The other thing, Private.”

The other thing. The alien thing, the cold black goo that sunk into him and now he can’t feel it any longer except yes he can. He can feel a foreign sense of satisfaction with an edge of calculation to it at the back of his skull if he reaches out. Pleased with itself but not off its guard either.

It. Feels weird to think of the alien that way, when Steve can _feel_ that it’s got emotions. Is this the wrong to time to ask for the alien’s gender? He feels like it is. He feels like maybe he should deal with this situation first.

“And were you the one who… _dealt with_ the spy?”

The spy. The man who shot Erskine only feet away from Steve, god, if only he’d seen, if only he’d pushed him away. He remembers grief, urgency, charging headlong towards the threat like an idiot, like he’s always done. He can’t remember reaching him.

“Dealt with?” he asks, eyes scanning the room.

Carter points to his feet. He looks down. There is a pile of red fabric on the ground in front of him.

Steve gets distracted, looking down at himself. He feels his eyebrows rise to somewhere around his hairline as his hands come up to touch his-- his _pectorals,_ he’s got pectorals now, Christ, how did that happen?

The separate satisfaction at the back of his head spikes as he touches what feels like it must be a hallucination, the most mortifying of hopeless dreams. But it’s real. It’s real and solid underneath his hand and _Steve has muscles._ Steve has _abs._ A six pack. He looks wide eyed up at Carter and gestures down at himself in a disbelieving _are you seeing this too_ sort of way. Carter nods at him sympathetically.

“The alien did this,” he realizes, recognizing the feeling that it’s radiating. It’s how Steve feels after a job well done, a sign finely painted, some goon so angry at Steve daring to step up to him that he forgets about whoever he was harassing in the first place. Success.

“The alien took over your body and ate the spy, then,” Carter says grimly.

_“Ate?”_

 

Steve is put in quarantine.

He’s always lived in places with paper thin walls, creaking timber, and zero insulation. Cold and noisy, everyone hearing everyone else’s business clear as day. This new place has padded walls, and as soon as the thick metal door clicks shut behind him (followed by half a dozen more clicks and clacks as the locks are put in place) the world outside goes completely mute. No distant sound of crowds, footsteps, chatter, traffic. There had been men in uniforms with guns at the sides of the door he’d entered. They’d been big and strong, and Steve had had to look down at them. He keeps feeling like he’s gonna trip and fall on his face, but then there’s a subtle shifting from the _other_ at the back of his head and somehow he doesn’t.

He surveys his new surroundings. White, soft walls. No windows. A few buzzing lights up in the ceiling. A bed, a toilet with a bit of a partition, presumably to shield Steve’s dignity from the large mirror in one of the walls. It’s not even pretending to be an actual mirror. Steve awkwardly waves at it before he can think better of it.

He looks around helplessly for a moment before going over to sit on the bed. He sits there helplessly for a moment before lying down on the bed.

Steve does not like feeling helpless.

“So,” he says, feeling sorta silly talking out loud to himself like he’s expecting an answer, “what’s your name?”

No reaction.

“Sorry, my manners-- I’m Steve Rogers, but you can just call me Steve since…” _you’re inside me_ except _nope_ that sounds a bit-- _dirty--_ “Since we’ll be working together?”

There’s a faint note of realization and then surprise from the alien, like it’s only just now putting together the pieces that Steve’s talking to it. Well, who else would he be talking to?

 **I am Winter,** says the alien.

Steve does a full body flinch. That was-- _weird._ Not like anything he’s felt or heard before. Like someone spoke, but so close to him that it’s not even like someone speaking right into his ear, but _closer._ Past his ears, words right in his brain. Strange feeling.

“Winter,” he repeats, taking it in. “That’s a,” pretty, “nice name.”

Pretty, in a sort of melancholy way, like sad violin music. That’s a bit much to say to a stranger you ain’t trying to flirt with, though, and Steve’s never liked the idea of flirting with someone you’ve just met.

“I just wanted for you to know,” he says, still feeling strange not having anywhere to look at but at the ceiling as he talks to Winter, “that I, um, don’t mind the eating the spy thing. He was shooting at us,” he killed Erskine, “and he was a Nazi besides.”

 **We needed fuel to improve,** Winter says matter of factly. **What is a Nazi?**

Steve flounders for a moment at the idea of explaining that to the alien. Of having to explain what a Nazi is in this day and age, and that humans have and sometimes are them. It’s an odd mixture of explaining something that feels incredibly obvious and having to fess up to a deeply humiliating personal failure, as if Steve is suddenly the representative of humanity who forgot to clean up the apartment before inviting guests over. Oh, darn, he’s forgotten to push the widespread violent discrimination underneath the bed, how embarrassing.

He searches for words that don’t reference more things that the alien doesn’t likely know about either, geography and past political movements and philosophies. “It’s people that follow a certain ideology… that want to kill other people just for the way that they were born. It’s about hate.”

It feels bare bones and dumbed down, like he’s explaining it to a four year old, but after a moment, it feels right and honest. Like all he’s done is removed all of the excuses and unnecessary details. At the end of the day, that’s all it is. Ugly hate and violence.

Winter doesn’t respond, or feel any particular way about that that Steve can tell. He supposes that it’s natural not to feel immediate empathy for a whole other species and their messes. Especially if that species has… wronged it, somehow. Steve’s stomach flips with guilt and worry, only now suddenly imagining what the last few months or years must have been like from Winter’s point of view. His ma was always talking about how he should put himself in other people’s shoes before judging them, and it’s only now first occurring to him to do it for Winter, like he’s not a person or something. Steve feels ashamed, but he quickly shrugs off the feeling. Wallowing in shame doesn’t help anybody, only the determination to do better.

He remembers an earlier concern that he can actually do something about immediately to help fix it.

“Hey,” he says, “what do you want for me to call you? Uh, not like your name. Your gender. Are you a man or a woman or… something else?” He feels clumsy and rude as he asks, like he’s committing a social faux pas. Like that time he assumed that Mrs. Flemons next door was pregnant when she… wasn’t.

There’s a long thoughtful pause from Winter, and then, **We don’t have gender the same way you humans do.**

“Oh,” Steve says, feeling a bit like he’s living in one of those pulpy sci fi novels that you can get for a dime.

**All of us could potentially breed with each other--**

“Mhmmm that’s really interesting,” he interrupts rudely, going red and high pitched for no good reason, cutting off information that the scientists no doubt watching him talk to himself like a loony behind that mirror would cut their own arms off for. “So, uh, what should I call you, though? He, her, they…? It’s just, I’ve been thinking of you as ‘it’ and that’s… that’s not right.”

Curiosity. **Why is it wrong?**

“It’s dehumanizing,” he says, and then immediately smacks a hand against his face as he remembers that he’s talking to a literal goddamned alien. “I mean-- not a person. Its aren’t people.”

Another long thoughtful pause.

 **He,** Winter decides. **Since you are my host and you are a he.**

“You don’t have to have the same pronouns as I do if you don’t want--”

**They will serve.**

Well, alright. Clearly, Winter doesn’t have any strong feelings about what he’s called. Steve’ll just call him what he wants to be called, then. Simple as that.

Another moment of silence. Steve isn’t uncomfortable with silence, as a rule, except that he’s bursting over with questions and curiosities over this whole… _thing._ Who wouldn’t?

“Are you okay with this?”

**With being trapped?**

He’d actually meant with Steve being his host. It’s not like Winter exactly got to choose, after all. As far as Steve understands it, Winter needs a host to survive on Steve’s planet, and Steve was the only one supplied to him. But this seems suddenly much more important.

“Yeah,” he says. “Are you okay?”

**I am fine. We could get out of this. The defenses and constraints are insufficient.**

As he talks, Winter feels distracted, like he’s not fully focused on the conversation. Thinking about something else. Steve is distracted from Winter’s distraction by looking incredulously at their surroundings. “Seriously? _This_ is insufficient?”

 **We can leave whenever we need to,** Winter says, utterly matter of fact about it.

Wow. Okay. Steve thinks about it, and decides not to inform the scientists at the other side of the mirror. Winter’s already calm and not trying to escape, and if they up security to the point that Winter _can’t_ escape, that will almost certainly change.

He settles in to wait his quarantine out, however long that may take.

 

Winter is waiting for Steve’s organs to start failing. For his body to begin rejecting him, panicking, falling apart. That’s when he’ll end his rest and strike. Take over the body, tear through the pitiful security, find a new host and a new meal, the latter probably being the dregs of Steve. It would be modus operandi, anyways. Practical. Cleaning up loose ends, waste not want not.

It’s strangely difficult to think of Steve as potential food, which is unusual for him. He isn’t sentimental. He doesn’t get attached to hosts.

It’s just that he put a lot of work into fixing Steve, is all. And he’s the most tolerable host he’s had by far. Polite and… _considerate._ Like Winter is someone to be respected, instead of feared and hated, like a disease and an enemy and a weapon held to his head. That tends to be usual response. Common sense.

“I’m not _doing_ anything here,” Steve argues with one of the people in white coats. “We should be put on the front lines.”

Winter suspects that common sense is not one of Steve’s strengths.

The doctor nervously pushes his glasses up his nose. “You are a scientific _marvel._ We have to take tests--”

“You’ve taken tests,” Steve shoots off impatiently. “Spit, urine, shit, blood, hair, skin, bone marrow, X-rays, endurance tests, weighings, videos, pictures. Heck, you pulled one of my _teeth.”_

Winter had not appreciated having to grow that one back. The spy will only last so long. He’s already feeling hunger nipping at him again, ahead of schedule.

“And we thank you for agreeing to it all--”

“And now there’s nothing more for me to do in a lab, so you should put me somewhere we can actually make a change! Wasn’t this all about helping with the war?”

“It’s not that simple, Mr. Rogers. We need more time to be able to understand what this even is. Perhaps,” he says carefully, coaxingly, like to a youngling that’s being stubborn and silly, “you should finally persuade the alien to let us harvest some of its slime for examination.”

Winter doesn’t even need to say anything. All he gets time for is the instinctive gut feel reaction of _hell no_ and then Steve’s already puffing up and narrowing his eyes dangerously at the doctor, who cringes back as he should. “We said _no.”_

“Um,” the doctor says, voice wavering. “Right.”

“So, do we get to ship out?”

“N-- I’ll, uh, I’ll consult with my superior about it.”

 **Bullshit,** Winter translates, a word from Steve that he rather likes. Steve doesn’t disagree with him.

 

They’re back in their room again. Soft, quiet, thick walls. Mirror. Bed. Toilet. Nothing else.

Winter is good at biding his time. He is patient, he is cold, he is barren, he is unceasing, he is unstoppable--

“Stop thinking about being the concept of a harsh winter,” Steve says.

Winter stops, more than a little scandalized and affronted at Steve’s interruption, which makes his host snicker, his grim gloom briefly retreating. But it comes back, just like the tide returning to wash over the sand.

Winter has never seen a beach before. Steve has, briefly, a grey overcast rocky thing while the air had enough chill to it to strongly dissuade him of the notion of taking a swim. There’s the concept of a sunny warm beach in his head though, taken from words and books and movies and commercials and other people reminiscing. They could see a proper one for the first time, together--

Steve is going to start dying any day now. Winter stops daydreaming.

Steve puts a hand over his mouth, and murmurs, “So, you said that you could break out any time you wanted to?”

Winter feels himself _stop._ He radiates incredulity like the sun casts off heat. _Really?_ Fucking _seriously?_

Steve, unsurprisingly at this point, picks up on the emotions he’s ringing off like a klaxon in the back of his head. “We don’t have any other choice! They’re not getting anywhere, studying us, and they’re not willing to let us go until they fully understand us which they never will. We need to sneak out if we want to be useful.”

Winter could point out that he’s an alien with zero stakes or investment in Steve’s human centric war, that he’s a predator with no ambitions beyond surviving and maybe even thriving, hunger sated and comfortably the most dangerous thing in the neighborhood.

Steve’s impatient helplessness, the hunted feeling of doing nothing when he should be doing something, grinds against his senses. He’s so unhappy here, like a plant denied sunshine. He wants to _do_ things. Put himself, and therefore Winter, in danger. It’s the only way that he will feel satisfied, useful, content. Endangering himself when he doesn’t have to goes against everything Winter is. He is efficient, he is survival, he will do what he has to no matter how terrible and he doesn’t fuck around.

Winter is also bored.

 **Fine,** he says. **Follow my lead.**

 

This isn’t like the last time Winter took over Steve, when he ate that spy. Steve is awake, aware, alert. Winter feels _closer_ somehow, his rapid fire impulses (jump, dodge, roll, punch) flickering through his head quick and easy for him to listen to or ignore. Winter keeps emerging from his skin like a shark from water to snatch at peoples guns and toss them far away, sweeping their legs out from under them, whipping out towards anything that protrudes and looks vaguely sturdy to pull them away from danger. It feels less like being possessed and more like fighting with someone at his back.

Steve’s never had backup in a brawl before. He really, really likes it. Makes it finally feel like something he can _win_ instead of something to struggle his way through only to have a black eye to nurse to show for it.

“I’m sorry!” he hollers behind them, his shout left in the wind as they soar through the air. “But we can’t just gather dust here when there’s a war to help end!”

None of the fellas shooting at them sound like they much care for his apology. Fair enough. Steve feels like they maybe broke a few noses and/or legs back there.

They successfully escape from their allies, and Steve laughs. He doesn’t think that the excited giddiness singing in his veins is all his.

 

Steve and Winter fight in the war. Winter absorbs bullets like rocks dropped into a pond, shooting them back out at the exact same velocity but in a different direction. Steve becomes used to being strong, fast, to being able to leap dozens of feet in any direction, to knowing that thanks to Winter he has a potentially _very_ long reach.

They are here against direct orders from the people Steve consider to be his superiors, but they keep staying and they keep surviving and they keep killing the enemy, and eventually ragged cheers go up from a certain side of the battlefield whenever they arrive, people supporting them and fighting at their back and shouting (unneeded, but sweet) warnings at them.

Steve constantly burns calories, and yet Winter eats enough to always feel the most full he’s ever been. Steve says ‘we’. Steve talks to him. Steve asks him for his opinion, how he feels, what he wants.

Steve is not dying, he realizes one late night as Steve is sleeping underneath the stars. He was thinking that Steve was taking a long time to start dying, longer than most, but he had never even once considered that he may be a symbiotic match. That they might be meant for each other.

Winter has never had a host that matched with him before. Never.

Steve’s brain waves and breathing tempo changes. His eyes flutter open. “Win?” he asks, voice faint with sleep. “Was’ the matter, bud?”

Winter must be giving off some sort of feeling disruptive enough to interrupt sleeping. He has no idea what it is. He just feels overwhelmed, blank with shocked realization.

 **You are alive,** he says, curling around Steve’s precious bones. Alive and his. He hadn’t ever thought that matching was ever in the cards for someone like him. And even if he had, he never would’ve imagined someone like _Steve._ He would have imagined someone practical, cold, curt, brutal. Not warm and kind and considerate and passionate.

He’s so happy that it’s Steve. Steve automatically smiles in response to the happiness.

“Yeah,” he says, still soft even as he wakes more firmly up. “I am, all thanks to you.”

Winter feels like he _ripples_ as Steve’s simple sweet words hit him like a physical impact. Steve’s hands cup his elbows in that gesture that means that he’s hugging Winter, his arms squeezing.

 **I am alive thanks to you as well,** Winter says, because it’s the truth.

“Looks like we’re both bringing something to the table, then.” Steve’s brain is pumping the chemical equivalent of pure fondness. It tastes even better than gray matter, and Winter soaks in it like it’s a puddle of sunshine.

 **I’m glad it’s you,** he says, because Steve has to know.

“I’m glad it’s you too,” he says, sincere to the core. He presses a kiss to his own hand, closes his eyes, and easily falls back asleep. Because he feels safe, here in this warzone out in the open. Winter feels so overcome that he has to seep partially out of his skin at that, to wrap himself around him, thick and warm and bulletproof, dark and hiding him in the night. His very own summer, precious and trusting and _his._

He’ll slaughter anyone who dares to approach.

 

A poster on a brick wall. There are ones just like it on many other walls. There is a handsome, muscular, blond man on it, wearing a black tactical suit of an unidentifiable material. He is smiling winsomely, showing off inhumanly sharp teeth. There is an american flag waving in the background. Large text at the top proudly names him as ‘America’s Monster’. Text at the bottom in quotation marks declares: “I eat Nazi’s for breakfast!”

It is extremely literal.


End file.
